Losing a Brother
by BohemianTypewriter
Summary: George's feelings after Fred dies. Does it make sense to keep on living after the one whom you live for is dead?First fanfic, ever. R&R


Fred's Death

I stare down at the husk that used to hold my twin brother, my face as blank as stone. I feel Harry, Ron, Hermione, the rest of my family looking anxiously at me. I fall to my knees.

Ginny lies down next to me and clasps my arm tightly, cradling her head against my shoulder. Ron and Bill and Charlie and even Percy hug me. Hermione takes my hand but none of them is worth it. I only pay attention to one person and he is gone.

Hands bear me up; pull me off his body. I thrash about hard, shouting and sobbing but no one lets me go. They slammed my body onto a table and tie me. I slam my head furiously against the table until it throbbed madly, then wailed in a horrible, dying animal way, as I see the hazy forms of my crying mother, my little sister curling into herself, her eyes shining with tears. They don't understand. None of them really needs him. They will mourn him, as will a handful of friends, but one person will fall apart because he's gone…and that's me.

I'm the only one who cared enough.

_Fred._

He was always there for me and vice versa, and after he's gone there's always something missing.

For a long time I believed Fred would come back to me. There were days when I turned around, my heart beating a wild, rapid rythm, sure I'd heard his voice all out my name. There was the time when I snapped out the needle with his name from my mother's clock, because it cut me fresh to see it again, forever stuck on dead but with the small smile glimmering around his mouth, eyes full of the glint that usually meant trouble for teachers. Times when I stayed in my room for days on end with a pillow over my head, if only so as to not hear my mother cry. The time I tried to cut my wrists but got caught.

After he died I would ignore everything and everybody. I would rarely show up for meals, I would just go back to bed or curl up in a closet or wander around the city. That way I rarely encountered anything that reminded me of Fred, because when I did remember him, it hurt so much I felt as if there was a volcano inside my body, and the frustration would burst out of me-at Mum, at Ginny, at the woman in the cashmere coat who bumped into me at the Muggle shop I'd hang around. I stopped speaking because my voice only reminded me of the low smooth notes that made up the song Fred's.

Ginny buried her sadness in her work, as did Percy, but I shut the shop just because the sign, Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, made me fall to pieces every time I went there. The place was too full of memories-the WORLD was too full of memories.

If you're a brother, and the other brother dies, do you stop being one? Or are you a twin forever, even when the second part of the equation is gone? I can answer that. At least for me, I was forever half of a whole that comprised Fred and I. for my whole life; it was always Fred and George, never one without the other.

This happened because I yelled at Fred when we were two; this happened because I thought our mother-and the rest of the world-was playing favorites; this happened because, for the shortest amount of time, I wondered what it would be like to not have a twin brother; I wondered what my life would be like without Fred, that i could be seen as an induvidual. Our whole life, we'd been together, we had the same friends, party invitations had our names intwined on them. Now I know. And I hate it.

One day Lee and Angelina came to visit. They stepped inside and looked at me. I felt Angelina's eyes go straight to my face and narrow slightly. I looked back at the tall black girl and noticed for the first time that my hair was in matted floppy clumps on my forehead. I brushed it out of my eyes, staring back defiantly until Lee, seeking to gloss over the sticky moment, starting talking about his idea for a product and I laughed. My hands flew to my mouth and I felt as if I'd shouted in a graveyard. Angelina's hand brushed te top of my head as she said, "He would have found it funny, too."

Once Angelina walked in on me in my bedroom. My mother had probably sent her up; she seemed worried abut me lately. I could just imagine the sound of her voice,'Oh, sweetie, could you check up on George? He's been worrying me lately.' I stubbornly stared at my feet instead of deigning to look t her. She walked in boldly and sat down on the top of a chest. I ignored her; maybe if I pretended she wasn't there, she'd eventually go away. "Are you crazy?" she asked. I sat up in my bed, staring at her. "Crazy?" I repeated. How could she be stupid and insensitive enough to say that to me, after everything I'd been through? I'd always considered her nice, very friendly. "Excuse me?"

Angelina stood up, angry. "Do you think this is what he'd have wanted? For you to split apart and stop eating, speaking, living? This is the loyalty you show to your brother?" I stared at her, confused. I'd been sure that what I'd been doing was expected, right, normal.

It took me a while, but I realised she was right. I owed it to my brother to continue my life. I remembered how, when we were just little kids, we swore that each of us would stand in the way of a Killing Curse to save the other. One of us had been hit by a Killing Curse, but the other one of us had died anyway. I had broken that promise.

So I slowly came back to normal. I talked to my parents and restarted Weasley's Wizard Wheezes and paid a bill or two. I came back to normal, and I married Angelina, who had been my link to the life I was living, instead of the drunken death that had been mine before she came up.

One time Ginny and I were sitting in the kitchen. She was showing me the pictures she'd taken. There was Hermione on her graduation day, her brown hair soft and lightly floating around her pink cheeks, a broad smile streched across her face. There was Ginny herself, grinning and waving with a broomstick cocked against her thigh. There was Ron with Harry, smiling, back from an around-the-world trip. There were plenty of me too, but she tried not to mention to me that there was someone missing from the pictures. Then, as if we'd conjured him, the last picture was of Fred, because it had been so long since she'd used her camera. He was dangling his legs from a bench, eating an apple. He stretched a hand out for whoever it was to stop taking his picture. I was behind him, wild-eyed with a full to bursting water balloon in my hand. Next thing I knew, I had hurled the balloon at him.

Ginny let me have that picture. I didn't frame it, instead I pinned it on the wall behind a board. It would change its position everyday, from my sock drawer to inside the pages of my notebook, wrapped in a pair of robes, as if it was his lifa and nobody could take it away as long as I guard it.

And when there are days I can't exactly remember the way he could walk silently over even the creaking floorboards or how the song of my brother's voice would lure me from my sleep, I would slip somewhere quiet and look at that picture. Then I would look at my own reflection, the one I share with Fred. I take him with me, where ever I go.


End file.
